Twitter has removed a label that designated NPR as a “US state-affiliated” media outlet mere days after first applying the label earlier this week. As of Saturday, the company now lists the public broadcaster as a “government funded” organization. NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn was the first to report on the change. He said Elon Musk told him Twitter would apply the “government funded” designation to other institutions in the coming days. “Tesla, which has received billions of dollars in government subsidies over the years, does not appear to have the label,” .
NEW: Label on NPR’s main account changed to “government funded,” and Elon tells me Twitter is “applying it to a larger number of institutions.”
— Bobby Allyn (@BobbyAllyn) April 8, 2023
The main NPR account has not tweeted since Twitter first applied the state-affiliated label on Wednesday. After NPR CEO John Lansing issued a statement pointing out that the “state-affiliate” did not apply to the public broadcaster under Twitter’s own guidelines, the company changed those guidelines. “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media,” the page said before Tuesday. By Wednesday, the company had removed the section of text that had referenced NPR. , less than one percent of its annual operating budget comes from government grants. Over the last five years, the majority of the non-profit’s revenue, about 70 percent, has come from corporate sponsorships and programming fees.
